DX Dream
by Tetsuwan Penguin
Summary: As a ham radio operator I've always imagined that Cobalt would have a Ham License. So I had this little day dream ...


**A DX Dream**

**I've **held an advanced class ham ticket since I was 18 years old, and eventually got my extra class license. At one point before getting married I had a rather decent station with a six element tri-band beam up around 45 feet in the air. I never worked a lot of real DX, that's ham slang for long distance, but I did enjoy rag chewing with other hams.

Now that my daughters had finished college, and I was looking toward retirement, I thought I'd get the old radio shack up and running again. The tired old vertical antenna that no longer worked was taken down and I put up a simple multi band dipole. Not anything fancy, but if you got on the air at the right time, on the right band, you could work some DX with it. At least, that was what I was hoping.

I'd been playing around with a homebrew ham rig for some time, and now that I had some free time on my hands I decided to get it on the air. It took me many hours debugging the thing. I had to write some software to control the radio's computer front panel, and the DSP unit had to be optimized. Then the radio frequency circuits had to be aligned, and everything carefully tested.

Finally, I had the rig working. I could hear stations on the air, and the transmitter loaded up into the dummy load correctly. My monitor 'scope showed a nice looking waveform, no clipping or over modulation. It was getting late and the twenty meter band seemed to be going dead for the night, but I thought I'd try and make a contact anyway.

Now for those of you that don't know anything about short wave, well let me explain some things. Frequency is actually measured in megahertz, but back in the early days of radio they measured the wavelength of the waves in meters. Yup, Americans were actually using the metric system for something back in the early days of the 20th century! There are five primary shortwave allocations that have been assigned to Amateur radio for nearly a century, and recently a few more were added. The 80 and 40 meter 'bands' (3.5-4.0 and MHz respectively) are generally open for medium distances during the day and open up for DX after sundown. The 20 meter band at 14.0 to 14.35 MHz, as well as the higher frequency assignments up to 29 MHz when they are open during high sunspot activity, can span the globe during the daylight hours, and and anytime actually when ol' sol is active. Twenty is the big DX band, that's where you hang out when you want to span the globe.

It was getting late, and I was tired. I had a hard time keeping my eyes open, but I was excited about getting my ham station on the air again, so I fought against my lack of energy with a pair of David Clark headsets clamped over my ears. I tuned across the band, there were some weak signals that I could barely make out, but nothing very strong. It appeared that the band had already closed for the day, but I decided to call CQ anyway.

"CQ" is ham slang for "anyone out there wanna talk?" So I set the VFO to the middle of the 'phone segment and keyed the mike. "CQ, CQ, CQ DX Twenty Meters. WA2MZE calling CQ 20." Click. I unkeyed the PTT switch and listened. Nothing. I yawned and moved lower I frequency towards the bottom of the phone segment. "CQ CQ CQ Twenty." One last try.

When I let go of the switch I had to quickly grab for the volume control. "WA2MZE WA2MZE, from 7K1JMS, 7K1JMS"

Holly cow! Guess the band isn't so dead. While answering him back I quickly used my laptop to Google the call sign and see just where he was. "7K1JMS, 7K1JMS, from WA2MZE. Handle here is Alvin, QTH Florida, USA. You're coming in like a ton of bricks, I had to crank down the volume!"

Google gave me a hit on the call sign, holy Moses, that call sign is from the Kanto region of Japan!

"WA2MZE, 7K1JMS returning. You have a 10 over s9 signal here too. Good copy, we must have a tunnel though the ionosphere between Tokyo and Florida today. Handle here is Coby, this is the Ministry of Science radio club. Running QRP here OM, 20 watts into a two element quad on the roof of the building. I built the rig myself from spare parts. WA2MZE, 7K1JMS."

"7K1JMS, WA2MZE. Well Coby, we're running QRP here too, about 15 watts to a full wave off center feed dipole about 35 feet up. Please QSL, believe it or not I don't have a card from Japan yet."

"WA2MZE, 7K1JMS. Sure thing Alvin, will QSL via the ARRL bureau, you can do the same. Nice talking with you, we gotta run now. Hakase is calling me. 73's. WA2MZE, 7K1JMS going QRT"

"7K1JMS, WA2MZE Nice talking with you too Coby. WA2MZE, pulling the big switch too."

**I **was awakened by a squeal in the headphones of a local tuning up, and my wife nudging me. I had fallen asleep listening to the radio. Was that QSL a dream or had I really worked Japan?

About a month later I got an envelope in the mail from the ARRL QSL bureau. There was a card in there from 7K1JMS. It was a beautiful QSL card, with the wording "Japanese Ministry of Science Radio Club" in English and Japanese along with the Call sign. Behind the lettering was a photo of the front of the building. I flipped the card over to read the details, sure enough I'd really worked them. A small photo of a head shot had been glued to the back, and the operator had signed his name, "Kobaruto". The photo looked familiar. It was no dream. I quickly filled out one of my QSL cards to drop in the mail back to him. I'd worked Atom's brother on twenty meters.


End file.
